logorrhea

I came across this word when I was looking to express my disapproval of long-winded descriptions in an inoffensive way. I stuck with calling it wordiness in the end, for fear of sounding pretentious (I may be pretentious, but that does not mean I need to sound it). After all, the craft of writing is about boiling your words down until you aren’t using any more than you need.

It was difficult to pick a favourite, but logorrhea wins the race because of its beautiful combination of the Greek logos – meaning word – and diarrhoea. The imagery it creates requires no further elaboration.

But feast your brains on these delicious alternatives: verbosity, prolixity, garrulousness, grandiloquence; sesquipedalianism. The fact that so many words exist for the concept of using too many words is very telling of the English language.